


Porcelain and Fog

by HathorAroha



Category: Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 08:51:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13586592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HathorAroha/pseuds/HathorAroha
Summary: What if Mr Potts, and not LeFou, had caught Mrs Potts when she fell from the chandelier in the castle battle?





	Porcelain and Fog

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone who catches the "Much Ado About Nothing" reference wins ten points to Gryffindor.

There is nothing but thin air as she tumbles from the chandelier, screaming, sure she will shatter when she hits the stairs far, far below. There is nothing but gravity to catch her, nothing to cling onto but thin air, and the stairs are there, she will shatter, she will die, but as long as Chip will survive, she—

A pair of hands catches her, an inch from the step, a split-second from breaking into a million porcelain pieces. She can hear something wooden like a rolling pin tumbling past, and she can feel herself being lifted up in two hands—she  _knows those hands_ —until she is face to face with—

Her own husband. Jean Potts. She feels her breath catch.

“Mr Potts!” she rasps, “You saved me!”

_But he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know who I am._

Chaos all around them—someone yells a string of swear words she hopes Chip is too far away to overhear, an oar of all things goes flying, and Mr Potts backs away up the landing back to a less chaotic corner. His hands still grip her porcelain form. She spots out of the corner of her eye, Garderobe and Cogsworth looking much relieved that she has not shattered on the ground. 

“How do you know me?”

Her attention flies back to her husband, who still regards her with great confusion, his brow furrowed.

“It’s me,” she blurts out, “Beatrice!”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

She is  _sure_ she hears her own heart shatter, like porcelain.

“But  _you do_!”

_He won’t remember. The Enchantress’s magic won’t let him._

But her heart rails against it, her love for her husband screams it back down, denies its truth.

“Do you not remember having a  _wife_?”

His answer is quick, brutal. “No. I have no children or wife.”

_No._

“But you do,” she shivers inside, “Does not the name Chip ring a bell?”

“No.”

_NO!_

“But it must!” she cries out, “it  _must!_  If not Beatrice, then at least our— _our_ —son’s name!”

The befuddlement in his eyes tells her otherwise. He doesn’t remember. He  _can’t_ remember. She sits there, anger simmering in her at the Enchantress. How she hates the Enchantress—oh! If she could get her hands on her! She would—she would—

A hiss of pain, one of his hands fumble for her handle. He shakes away the pain out of his other hand now at his side. Only then does she notice copious steam rises from her spout. She’s started to heat up in her outrage against this accursed Enchantress, and tries desperately to cool down, so she would not burn her husband.

“Sorry,  _sorry_!” she tries to think of something calming—like tea in front of a fire while reading a book to Chip. Calm. Calm.  _Stay calm!_ “I didn’t burn you, did I?”

“No, just a little.”

She can hear the mob and the staff still fighting alongside each other, someone nearly knocks into Mr Potts as they run past.

“Why are they  _here?_  This mob! Why do you attack the castle!”

Fear flickers in his face. “There’s a beast—”

“ _No!_ ” Mrs Potts tries not to boil inside, “No! He is— _is_ —a prince! He was turned into a beast by the enchantress!”

“Gaston’s gone to kill him—”

“ _What?_ ” she can hardly breathe—they’re going to kill him, going to kill her Adam, the prince she loved like her own son. “No! He’s the prince!  _Belle loves him!_ ”

“Belle?  _That_ Belle?”

“Brunette? Loves books?”

He nods.

“Is she here?”

“Gaston had her and Maurice locked up in a cart headed for an asylum, convinced of their madness.”

She can feel herself rapidly approaching boiling temperature.

“Set me down! Now!”

He sets her down on a ledge nearby in this relatively calm part of the landing, and she lets herself hiss and steam, her lid rattling with the temperature.

“This Gaston  _locked them up?!”_ she shrieks,  _“_ And  _has come to kill my Adam!_ ”

Mr Potts, the picture of fear, backs away from her rage.

“ _Explain!”_

Several moments pass before Mr Potts is able to pull himself together enough to explain.

“Belle had a mirror—a magic one—and she showed us the Beast in it—”

“She  _showed_ everyone?”

“Gaston cursed it as dark magic, said she was under this beast’s—”

“Adam. Not ‘beast’.  _Adam_.”

“…spell.”

“There is no spell but the one that caused everyone to forget!”

_To forget their own loved ones._

Something, something she can’t quite read, crosses his face, almost as if—but no. He cannot remember. Cannot remember a thing about their love, about Chip. He takes a cautious step forward, as if to peer closer at the teapot.

“Please!” she pleads, trying to get him to see the truth, “Please believe me!”

He stops, blinks.

“I’m talking to a teapot that seems to know me,” he says, “And there’s furniture attacking us.”

“Because they’re  _people!_ Enchanted! Turned into objects like…”

“Like a teapot?”

“ _Yes!_ Or a teacup like—” she stops herself from saying  _like Chip._ “Please! Try to remember! Remember  _me!_ ”

_Enchantress! Just one exception! I beg of you, just one!_

“I do not remember you.”

_What I would give to hear him say my name and know he loves me!_

He shakes his head, frowns. “I don’t know any Beatrice.”

“You—”

 _He doesn’t remember at_ all.

“You don’t even know my voice?”

“It sounds…familiar,” he admits, “Like I’ve heard it before.”

“You have. You  _have_.”

She would have wept, but her mind still races, still holds on with horror at the thought of Belle and her father being cast to an asylum, of her Adam being killed by some bloodthirsty monster. Suddenly, she hates this Gaston very,  _very_ much.

“Oh were that I a man, I would eat his heart in the marketplace.”

Mr Potts flinches back, stares at her. And only then she realises she’d said it out aloud, one of Belle’s new favourite Shakespeare lines—and hers too, the second she had heard of it.Never mind that now. Her voice turns low, hard, and dangerously calm with her cold rage.

“Go back to the village. Find Belle. Get her here. Find a way. Before it’s too late. Before this  _Gaston_  kills Adam.  _Please._ ”

Not one tremor in her words betrays the now very real fear of becoming inanimate forever.

“Just  _go._ ”

Right then, she hears what sounds like fireworks going off, and she swirls around on the ledge in time to see people running and screaming for the entrance, a jubilant candelabra—Lumiere—running after them, sweeping his “arms” at them as if to shoo them away for good.

“Go  _now_.” she urges, turning around to face her husband again.

“It’s too late—” he begins.

“Go! Before it  _is_  too late!”

_Too late to save her. Too late to keep him from seeing me fade away forever._

She cannot bear it, the thought of turning inanimate in his presence, even if he doesn’t remember who she is anymore. For all she knows, when they all finally become completely inanimate, he would remember again. He would know why her voice was so familiar.

“Now! The others are leaving!”

He starts to turn around, to rush away with the other villagers, when she calls after him.

“Wait!”

He stops—turns to face her. She steels herself, pulls together enough composition to say a few last words to him. In case she should become inanimate forever, in case he should remember  _if_ she faded away for good. Locking her gaze on his, she smiles best she can, and is glad her painted lips cannot twitch with emotion.

“I love you.”

* * *

He sprints away, her last words ringing in his ears. Haring down the stairs, he does not have time to reflect on why everything here seems so familiar—that teapot’s face and her voice, it stirred  _something_ in him. And try as he might, he could not think why “Beatrice” or “Chip” should be familiar to him at all; they were no more familiar to him than a stranger’s name.

Buffeted along by the other screaming villagers, he quickly finds himself back out in the snow. He doesn’t know why, but something in the teapot’s urgent, pleading words spurns him on back to the village, where no doubt everyone else was fleeing to after being defeated by enchanted furniture.

_Find Belle—_

He narrowly misses being run down by a galloping horse, with a familiar rider on its back. One glance at the young lady on the horse’s back and he knows it’s Belle. Obviously she—and presumably, her father—had found a way to escape the cart.

“Belle! Wait!” he gasps, trying to wave for her attention.

“What!” she snaps down at him.

“He’s inside—Gaston—the beast—the teapot told me—”

He’s sure he imagines her muttering “ _Mrs Potts?_ ” and she is off in a flash, the horse’s hooves muted on the snow. Just a coincidence, his thoughts agree. There are many people with the last name Potts—she could be anyone. Both happen to have the same last name, just by complete happenstance.

He joins the other villagers who all run and shout around him as they tear down the garden paths in the direction of the forest, escaping winter back into the warm arms of summertime. He is frankly relieved that he can go back home now, just forget this whole thing had ever happened. He can wake up in the morning and pretend it was a strange fever dream, and carry on with his life.

When he reaches the border between palace and forest, Jean comes to a sudden stop, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. He hears others stop too, someone gasps, and another whispers to their companion. Next to him, Clothilde stuffs her hand in her mouth, and he is surprised to hear a restrained sob from her. For his part, Jean swivels around to see the palace has become completely dark, with not even the smallest candle shining through the night. Thrown in complete darkness, the palace melts into the backdrop of night, and the gardens themselves seem lost in the pitch black.

“Henri…” Clothilde breathes, her hand lowering from her mouth, “I—I forgot.”

Something is terribly wrong here, so awful even Clothilde is undone with the horror of it. And there is a strange sense that the fog in his head is lifting, thinning out, teasing at revealing what he had lost for all this time.

_Beatrice…I’ve heard that name before._

He fancies too that maybe he had heard the name Chip somewhere too.

Someone points up at a window on the west wing of the castle; he follows their finger and sees a glimmering shower of golden light and…and  _something_ there, but he cannot make out what it is. But what he knows is that the fog of something forgotten is lifting and lightening with each second, and he can just make out the silhouette of what had been lost to him for years.

And, bit by bit, it comes back to him as, to judge by the sudden flurry of whispers and emotional outcries around him, it seems to do so for many others around him. Was it just him or had it become warmer now? Become more like summer, just as it was in the village? The sky itself is already lightening in the hint of summer’s early dawn.

_Beatrice. Chip._

The fog is thinner, and he can grasp on to what he had forgotten now, he can see her blue eyes and auburn hair, and he remembers his brown hair and endless energy—

Wife. Son.

_He had a wife and a son._

Someone grips his arm—he looks over to see the jam seller lady looking with wide eyes at the castle.

“Do you remember again too?” she asks. “We had a prince all this time! How had we  _forgotten?_ ”

And she lets go of his arm and runs on fleet feet in the direction of the castle.

But all he can think of is his Beatrice back at the castle. His words come back to haunt him.

“ _I have no wife or children._ ”

And the way she had said her last words—almost as if she had expected to—

No. He cannot bear the thought of losing her  _now_ , just when he remembered her and Chip again! He can’t lose his wife, let alone his son, again.

Were that he still had the fleet feet of his boyhood years! But he can walk fast, and he does, hoping against hope that his wife and child live. He doesn’t know if she’s still a teapot, but it doesn’t matter now. He  _has_ to find them again, he  _needs_ to know they’re alive. He  _needs_ to tell them he remembers them again. He has found what he had lost all these years.

He loves them so much, and there is too much garden between himself and the castle, and in his desperation to get back to them, the grounds seem to stretch forever, and the castle itself may as well be on the distant horizon.

But he  _will_ find his beloved wife and son again, he  _must_ see they live and are well.  

_I remember you, my darling Beatrice, I remember you now._


End file.
